So good evening, friends, colleagues, it's a great privilege to to introduce David Luban to give the first of this this year's terror lectures,
or as we know, all traditions are invented. So in line with the invention of tradition, the terror lectures already invented tradition and a new one,
but one that we're very happy to welcome to Oxford and to the history of art department.
Perhaps I should just say a little bit about the context of this. The Terra Foundation for American Art, based in Chicago,
has very generously funded a visiting professorship in American art for the current year and next year.
And we hope this will be an ongoing project. The principal aim of the terror visiting professorship is to embed within the history of our
department the teaching of American art at both undergraduate and taught postgraduate level.
David Lubin, who is the distinguished holder of this position for the first time,
is busily teaching a way master students and this term history of our undergraduate students.
But it seemed a terrible shame to have such a distinguished historian of American art
here amongst us in Oxford and not give a wider community a chance to hear from him.
So David was very generous in saying yes to the suggestion that he should speak to us.
And so we have set up this small series of four lectures in which he will be talking to us on the theme of Picturing a Nation.
David comes to us from Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
But even more importantly, he comes to us as really one of the most significant living historians of American art.
Who's ranged very broadly across that field. So we're delighted to have him inaugurating this.
Some of you may have been at his lecture in the Rothermere American Institute.
His most recent book deals with American artists and the First World War,
particularly timely given that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the United States entry into the First World War.
And it's a theme related to war that he's going to talk to us about tonight to kick off the first of these four lectures,
writing into history, marching into oblivion, the civil war, racial justice and the Shaw Memorial.
So please welcome to the podium Professor David Leupen. Thank you, everybody, for turning out on this rotten afternoon, try to.
Well, at least for me, it's not what I thought of. This may. Should that may.
Should be in Britain. But anyway. All right. So, yes.
So this to end is light. OK, on the screen.
It's fine. Good. Thank you. In the first and the first several decades following the Civil War, Lipps glasses are fine.
Sorry we start that over with a pair of glasses I hope will stay on.
In the first several decades following the Civil War, the Irish born American sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens,
shown here early and late in his career, spoke to his contemporaries with large public works that engaged their minds and moved their spirits.
Not all the pieces he sculpted were actually memorials. But many of the best were as here, for example, the famous monument.
To Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a young white abolitionist from Boston and the all black Civil War Regiment he commanded since antiquity,
the medium of sculpture has been an ideal mode for memorialising the dead because the substances involved are relatively stable and permanent,
intended to withstand the diminishment of time. St. Gaudens was 19th century America's greatest sculptor of memory.
He moulded and shape the past for Americans in ways that many that may or may not have been historically accurate,
but which were always visually compelling and emotionally resonant.
My lecture this afternoon will explore some of the most important of these monuments and memorials and
try to understand how they affected Northerners collective memory of the recent national cataclysm.
St. Gaudens didn't start off his career with civil war representation. First, he made his name with intimate sculptural portraits.
This was a bold move for centuries. Oil painting, not sculpture, had been the medium par excellence for conveying the personality of sitters.
It even though St. Gordon's toiled instead with notoriously stiff and obdurate materials such as marble and bronze,
he often managed as well as any painter to endow his sisters with nuances of life.
Here, for example, is a small bronze portrait. Only seven inches high of his friend, Charles McKim.
The noted American renaissance architect in here.
Considerably larger at two by two feet by three is a double portrait of the novelist William Deane Haoles and his daughter Mildred,
saying Gordon's delicate three quarter length portrait of Sarah Redwood Lee,
the daughter of a friend, balances elements of forthrightness and reticence,
perhaps like the 16 year old subject herself, whom he shows poised between girlhood and womanhood.
Looking back from the end of his life, he singled this out as one of the best portraits he ever made.
This extraordinary bar relief is from his portrait of Marianna Griswold Van Rensselaer.
She was an influential art critic of the time who championed his work.
And this is from his wedding portrait of Bessie Smith White, the bride of his friend and colleague, Stanford White,
another eminent American renaissance architect and a partner with Charles McKim in the firm of McKim,
Mead and White, one of the best of the artist's early sculptural reliefs.
Is Louise Miller Howland. The panel, which is about three feet high.
Shows an attractive middle aged woman standing beside a piano, on top of which sheet music has been gathered in an untidy pile.
She entwines her hands loosely before her and seems to focus her attention elsewhere.
This is the parlour world described by St. Gordon's as contemporary Thomas Aikens in paintings such as Elizabeth at the Piano.
We're here singing a pathetic song, but no music is being performed.
It has been set aside as the subject turns her head toward another realm.
Louise Miller Howland was deceased when her widowed husband commissioned St. Gaudens to sculpt this work,
and it poignantly conveys a sense of life interrupted. Another intimate portrait, relief.
The St. Gaudens modelled this time later this time.
Later in mid career was not originally intended as a memorial.
In 1887, he met and sculpted the ailing Scottish poet and storyteller Robert Lewis Stevenson
during the author's stopover visit in New York on his way to the South Pacific,
where he hoped to recover from chronic lung disease. The resulting bronze medallion shows the slender, long haired Scotsman writing in bed,
propped up by pillows with the pages of a manuscript balanced on his tented knees.
It's probably the most charming sculpture ever made of a writer at work fun, intimate, behind the scenes.
And he had it's also sweet and touching a snapshot or cameo of a bed ridden author who manages,
nevertheless to transformed his enforced indolence into imaginative play.
The image St. Gaudens rendered of Stevenson was irresistible and quickly became well-known and often reproduced,
ultimately defining the way the future generations of Stephensons readers pictured him were in keeping with my theme.
Remembered him in their mind's eye. A decade after the storyteller's death in Samoa in 1894,
a committee in his hometown of Edinburgh commissioned St Gordon's to convert the medallion into a matau into a moral plaque for St Giles Cathedral.
Thus, what had begun as a private portrait became a public monument.
Likewise, Stephen S. Gordon's statue for the grave of Henry Adams recently decisive deceased wife Marion,
a work of intense feeling and profound inscrutability eventually became despite the widower's wishes.
A tourist attraction in Washington, where it was installed in 1891.
In a quiet cemetery grove. Adams, a distinguished historian and the direct descendant of two U.S. presidents,
was a deeply self questioning individual who rejected the reigning pieties of his time, be they religious, social or political.
He was drawn to Buddhist and Hindu teachings about Nirvana were nothingness.
And he wanted his wife's grave. And eventually his own to be marked by a reminder of life's unfathomable mysteries and ambiguities.
St. Gaudens obliged him brilliantly. As a consequence turn of the century,
visitors to the Adams Memorial mused on the nature and meaning of the shrouded
figure debated at sex and wondered what dark secrets of the future foretold.
The first memorial that St. Gaudens specifically intended for public consumption.
The Feragut Memorial was unveiled in New York's Madison Square 10 years earlier in 1881.
The feragut monument was in certain ways the exact opposite of the Adams Memorial.
For here, the scarps, the sculptural figure on display in Denn engendered in viewers not a mood of doubt and perplexity, but of supreme confidence.
The recently deceased commander of the union, Navy Admiral David G.
Feragut, was legendary during the Civil War for his bravery under fire as envisioned here in his colour lithograph depicting the Battle of Mobile Bay.
That's him leaning from the rigging.
In the economic boom and bust years that followed the war, frigates rallying cry to his fleet, that mobile mobile bay.
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, entered the lexicon as the phrase the best embody the intrepid.
Go ahead, Spirit. The Gilded Age Americans believed we'd see them through to greater and greater triumphs.
By encapsulating this spirit in a powerful and heroic visual image, St. Gaudens is monument,
which instantly became famous and gave the sculptor widespread fame,
provided Americans, at least those from the victorious North, with a flattering image of themselves in their recent collective past.
Feragut specifically alludes to Donna Talos, early Renaissance sculptural masterpiece of another legendary warrior, St. George.
The admiral shown here in a plaster reduction, stands resolute as if on the bridge of a naval vessel, his face defiantly into the wind.
He faces defiantly into the wind, which St. Gaudens definitely indicates.
By the parting of the coat at his knees. This serves at once as a realistic detail and a subtle reference to ancient Greek sculpture,
which revelled in the rendition of Aperol blown back or thrown open by the wind,
as in the Lou's great historic Hellenistic masterpiece, The Nikkei of Sammeth race from the second century B.C.
S. Gordon said much admired this work during his student days in Paris, Nikkei, the goddess of victory, is shown at the moment.
She is descended from the heavens to the prowl of a ship that she, too, like.
The old admiral, is a ship born and windblown. Wrote one admirer.
Quote, The admiral stands perfectly still. His hands are not raised in gesture.
His mouth is not open. But he is so much a man that he holds one's attention instantly and he is so quiet that he seems to move.
The artist succeeded in making him almost quiver with pulsating life.
Saying guidances standing Lincoln unveiled in Chicago in 1887 and on a base designed by Stanford White when even greater acclaim,
the Lilliputian figure you see standing beside the empty chair is the sculptor himself.
With this monument, he provided his contemporaries a remarkable visual image by which to remember or if you will, misremember their recent past.
Indeed,
this is the statue most responsible for creating the iconic image of Lincoln that we have today as rendered in film fiction and five dollar bill.
The tall, lanky, craggy faced, awed or shambling forward to speak, his brow ponderous with thought,
his clothes wrinkled as if only from as if not only from normal wear, but also the weight of responsibility bearing down on his shoulders.
Up until St. Gaudens entered the field, Lincoln monuments typically showed him as the Great Emancipator with free Negro slaves grovelling at his feet.
They served up a Lincoln that, to our eyes seems outlandishly faux and sentimental, perhaps even insufferable.
With their declamatory gestures and pious expressions, they lack the grabby tongues and leonine presence of St. Gaudens.
Later, rendition. Given what they were used to, viewers were dumbstruck by what they took to be extraordinary realism of the standing Lincoln.
How did St. Gaudens achieve that effect? They wondered, at least in part.
He did so through concerted research like a method actor preparing a role, although in this case, a role to be played by his statue.
The sculptor immersed himself in Lincoln's letters and speeches,
read all the current biographies of the man and the memoirs by those who knew him intimately pored over the many daguerreotypes
for which the president had posed and even went so far as to examine 1860 life casts of Lincoln's face and hands.
That had recently come to light. Gordon's exploits an array of small external details and gestures to convey the rich inner life of the man.
For example, the wrinkling of his vest echoes the wrinkling of his brow.
His head is downturned as if in thought. In this regard, he resembles the figure that Thomas ECNs portrayed.
Thirteen years later, in nineteen hundred for a portrait known as The Thinker,
Aikens similarly depicts a tall, lanky, solitary individual rumpled in clothing in plunged in thought.
The watch Tchang watch chain hanging across Lincoln's torso serves as a momentum, more eye,
an iconographic reminder of the chains of time and hence the premature amant mortality
that tragically awaited the president from the moment he took his first fate.
His fatal first step forward into the office that would eventually consume his life.
His left hand clutches at his lapel, a gesture saying Gordon's learnt that was common for Lincoln when making speeches.
The right hand balled in a fist disappears behind his back.
This retraction of the hand behind the back was unheard of in public sculpture.
And at length apiece, a startling air of mystery, tension and suppressed power.
Perhaps the most extraordinary element was the vacant seat behind the orator.
This was a novel idea for public sculpture, a standing figure beside an empty seat.
It bespeaks absence. Someone was sitting there in his doing so no longer.
He has moved on. This is similar to the metaphore a come underline.
Louise Miller Howland. The relief portrait we examined earlier in which the deceased woman who is being memorialised
seems to have gotten up from her piano and turned toward another plane of existence.
On one level of interpretation,
Lincoln has abandoned the safe confines of his chair to advance his carefully chosen and intensely resisted plans for the union.
But on another level, he has begun his transition into immortality,
a notion that was conveyed by the war secretary Edward Stanton's famous remark made at the president's deathbed.
Now he belongs to the ages. The power of the standing Lincoln for St. Gaudens is contemporaries.
Was that it managed to appear real and authentic while at the same time transcendent, an embodiment of moral, even spiritual strength.
What was lost, however, in this new naturalistic view of Lincoln?
Lincoln, the man rather than the saint, was his role as Emancipator.
As we have seen those earlier, highly sentimental sculptural groups were racially condescending.
And yet, for all of that, they acknowledged the all important fact that was systematically erased.
Later in the 19th century, which is that the civil war was waged first and foremost over slavery by 1887 after the collapse
of reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow racism throughout the north as well as the South,
most American white Americans wanted to minimise the importance of slavery as the cause of the war.
Instead, they preferred to see the upheaval as an honourable and heroic clash of political philosophies,
which Lincoln gave his life to resolve by forsaking his predecessor's insistence on showing Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.
Saint Gaudens helped to shift the public's memory of the president to that of the great unifier instead.
And in so doing, hastened the disappearance of racial justice for the national agenda.
In the early 80s 90s, the sculptor received the commission to create a monument to one of the civil wars most controversial military leaders,
William to come, says Sherman, who had just died. Sherman, as you know, was the union general who besieged Atlanta in 1864, and after starving,
the populace burnt the city to the ground, cutting a swath 60 miles wide on their march from Atlanta to the sea.
His forces some 60000 strong laid waste not only to public buildings and railways, but also to vast amounts of property.
Civilian casualties were high. Homes were torched, fields trampled.
Women harassed and raped. Here was the first instance in history of what historians now call total war.
This was state sanctioned violence against the civilian population as part of a larger military campaign.
Historically, it was an unprecedented act of terrorism. Needless to say, that was not to be the focus of the monument dedicated to his memory.
Not long before his death, Surman Sherman sat for a portrait bust facing Gordon's,
although it smoothes away the rough edges of the dishevelled and beetle browed general as memorably recorded in civil war era photographs.
It conveys, nonetheless, a sense of quiet agitation.
St. Gordon's scholar Thayer Tolis writes that the sculptor's contemporaries, quote, marvelled at how the portraits truthful appearance,
the parted lips, weathered skin, bristled beer and a beard in a stew and askew cravat so forcefully captured the nervous power of the SIDOR.
When the Sherman Monument was unveiled in New York in 1983, critics considered it the sculptor's masterpiece,
an equestrian statue to be ranked on a par with the great Italian renaissance prototypes.
Donatello's got to Malaita and Pride in Padua, which I show here, and Viro Skios Equality only in Venice.
Angled forward on his charger, boots, piercing the stirrups, military cape swooping back in the wind.
Determination stamped across his face.
St. Gaudens is Sherman epitomises the Nietzsche and Wilt power that many early 20th century observers regarded as the special genius of America.
In 1983, President Theodore Roosevelt famously described his form, his foreign policy as speaking softly and carrying a big stick.
As an equestrian group, the Sherman Monument conveys something to the same idea with the surging power of the mounted
rider prefaced and mollified by the virginal beauty and innocence of the winged victory.
Again, St. Gaudens invokes the Nikkei of of Sammeth race, this time explicitly.
Crowned in Laurel and Krass and clasping a Palm branch.
A symbol of victory. St. is Nikkei amounts to a public relations advance man or advance woman.
Her job is to soften or even disguise the raw brute power of American military and industrial
might as embodied by the fearsome Yankee general who brought the Confederacy to its knees.
Less this seem like an anachronistic interpretation.
I should note that Southerners at the time mocked the sermon on the sermon mocking sorry, mocked the sermon monument,
saying it was, quote, just like a northerner to send a woman ahead of him so nobody could shoot.
Henry James, writing in 1986, was similarly unimpressed with the monuments counterbalancing of warlike masculinity and idealised femininity.
He thought that the grim general straining into the breeze or in his words, the enemy blast, was a brilliant personification of the brutality of war.
And that same guidance should have left it at that.
What James objected to was the addition of what he called, quote, the form of a beautiful American girl.
The artificial pairing of the Cape to conquer with a radiant virgin serves, as James put it, puts it, quote, to confound destroyers with benefactors.
He believed that a war monument requires greater fidelity to history.
He said, I would have Schurman deadly and terrible a war.
God quested with snakes, not irradiating benevolence, but signified by every ingenious device, the misery, the rune and the vengeance of his track.
Victory, James's beautiful American girl, as shown here in a detailed from a gilded bronze reduction,
was the last in a long line of idealised goddesses and angels.
The Saint Gorton's used to embellish his memorials, his angels for the Morgan tomb, which were destroyed by fire in 1884.
His caryatids for the Vanderbilt mansion fant fireplace shown here on the left.
And here's a more Caritas toss on the right were highly influential in the way that late 19th and early
20th century Americans envisioned ideal feminine beauty as something almost androgynous in nature.
As in these two paintings by the sculptor's colleague and neighbour Abbott Fair.
Probably more than any other American artist,
Sync Gaudens was responsible for inventing the look of the fantasy Hekla Angel that remains familiar today as witness,
for example, Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Whether nude, like Diana, the classical goddess of the hunt,
a as a weathervane to the old Madison Square Garden or clad in celestial garments and victories in wings like victory, same gardens is idealised.
Females serve a strategic purpose for his contemporaries.
Their pulchritude. That is their consummate physical beauty.
Counterbalance male hardness and sharp and hard heartedness.
It infused manly universes, a business, sports, politics and war with an offsetting and stimulating femininity.
Without these angels and goddesses, the public sphere in public sphere given such compelling visual form by saying Gaudens and his fellow
American Renaissance artists and architects might have seen too nakedly masculine driven in blunt.
Saying Gaudens in Carp, Inc., an angel into his finest public monument, which marks the summit of his career.
This was the memorial erected in Boston to Colonel Robert Gould, Shaw and the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry,
the first regiment of black soldiers organised in the North during the Civil War.
Shaw died in 1863, along with a great number of his men during a futile charge against Fort Wagner,
a Confederate stronghold strategically situated on a small island outside Charleston, South Carolina.
The battle is imagined here in this lithograph, the 1990s.
Set within a columned granite and marble frame, St. Gaudens is large bronze relieve rest between two stately elms on Beacon Street.
Rest between two, a elam's on Beacon Street above Boston Common, bearing laurel and poppy, symbols of victory and death.
The angel is stern and gaunt, not an aethereal, sweet faced innocent girl, but a mature woman hardened by sorrow.
She soars like a ponderous cloud over the heads of the men whom St. Gaudens depicts solemnly marching off to war.
Unlike victory in the Sherman Memorial, who conspicuously keeps her distance from the great wire at her heels, the angel,
the Shaw Memorial presses close to the men beneath her as if she were an abiding thought emanating from their heads.
Indeed, the Shaw Memorial is an altogether different sort of public monument from those we have considered.
For one thing, it's a relief sculpture rather than a freestanding sculpture.
As such, its mood is reticent. Feragut commands from the quarterdeck of his imaginary ship, Lincoln steps into immortality.
Sherman launches himself into the winds of war and Diana holds court over the imagine over the Empire City.
There is none of that self projection with the Shaw Memorial. Colonel Shaw seems almost to resist the viewer's attention.
He's, quote, Lean is a compass needle to borrow Robert Laws arresting phrase,
which refers not only to Shaw's physical being, but also his but also his moral bearing laws.
Well-known poem from 1960 for the Union Dead describes the read the writer on the freeze as having,
quote, an angry wren like vigilance, a Greyhound's gentle tautness.
He seems to wince at pleasure and suffocate for privacy.
As we saw earlier, Bas-relief was the type of sculpture with which Saint Gorton's achieved his most personal portraiture.
Think back to the Stevenson Memorial, the Stevenson Medallion, or the beautiful portrait of young Sarah Redwood Lee.
Even though the Shaw Memorial is a major monument in the heart of a busy city.
It's intimate and does. It is intimate and discreet.
More along the lines of the private and introspective Adams Memorial.
Surely this anomaly serves stems from the unusual nature of its origin, like feragut,
Sherman and Lincoln Shaw was commissioned by prominent citizens wishing to commemorate a great military leader.
But the difference here is that the group, the commission, the Shaw Memorial,
was comprised of high minded Bostonians, so several of whom had been ardent abolitionists.
These men were disheartened by the recent demise of reconstruction and the resultant amnesia that was causing Americans to misremember the
war as a glorious contest between chivalrous heroes rather than the terrible but necessary cataclysm over slavery that it actually was.
The commissioners saw it a memorial that downplayed military valour and paid
tribute instead to the cause for which the young colonel and his coloured troops,
as they called them, had rendered their lives.
Hence the sorrowful rather than celebratory nature of this monument in the ongoing battle of symbols and ideas as to how the war would be remembered.
It insisted, especially with the angel of death hovering overhead, that failure, tragedy and loss are inalienable aspects of any victory.
A related explanation as to why this monument looks so different from the others, so much more personal.
Is that the family of the individual being honoured was actively engaged in the creative process.
Shaw was a 26 year old,
Harvard educated Boston Brahmin raised by a family long committed to the belief that slavery was wrong and should be abolished at any cost.
When the war ended and proud New Englanders called for his moderate murdered body to be
disinterred from its mass grave and reburied with honours in the ancestral city of Boston,
his parents refused, explaining that their son would have preferred to remain with his men, even in death.
Later, when St. Gaudens received the commission for the memorial and planned to make a heroic equestrian statue of IT Shores,
parents intervened again.
They objected that their son was not an important military commander, and a statue portraying him as a hero and a horse would be inappropriate.
Again, they insisted that he would have wished to remain with his men and to that ex.
And to that end, Saint Gaudens dropped the idea of a freestanding equestrian statue and began designing a multi figure monument instead.
This necessitated a freeze because under the financially restricted terms of commission,
it would have been impossible to sculpt a whole ensemble of statues in the round in the design that resulted.
Shown here in the gilded plaster cast version now at the National Gallery in Washington,
the men and the rifles bunch up behind the mounted colonel like a steel spring compressed in space, ready to uncoil.
A sharp, angular linearity defines the scene. But these hard angles are relieved at intervals by the circular bedrolls,
canteens and drum, as well as the curving flanks of the horse and his involution tail.
Others softening elements are the mantle of the angel which undulates in is which sorry,
which undulates in a sweet Raisi swoop and the elongated arch that encloses the freeze.
Shaw's charger's seems more emotional than the Colonel or any of his men.
The scene is fraught, but all the human agents within it exhibit self-control equivalent to that of the writer over his mount.
Indeed, one of the most innovative aspects of the Shaw memorial was its dignified individualising of the black troops.
S. guidance has given each of the 16 or so fully or partially visible faces distinct characteristics, offering the viewer a range of race appropriate.
But also age appropriate facial structures and types.
Thus, for example, he suggests that while some of the older soldiers haven't touched a razor in years, some of the younger have yet to use one.
The reason it took St Gordon's 13 years to complete the commission, by far his longest period of gestation,
is that he sculpted some 40 portraits, studies of African-American heads before arriving at the much smaller Codrea faces.
He incorporated into the final version. Sad to say, Saint Gaudens entertained some of the typically racist attitudes of his time and place.
And yet, as the art historian Kirk Savage has persuasively argued,
the internal logic of the piece compelled the sculptor to transcend his own limited and bigoted beliefs.
For there was no way that he could pay tribute to Colonel Straw without treating Shaw's men with equivalent seriousness and respect.
Whatever his intentions may have been,
the work that resulted is unique in 19th century American art for the dignity and depth of humanity of accords, people of African descent.
In this, he was going very much against the tide of racial representation in late 19th century America,
where black soldiers were typically depicted as lazy, overgrown children incapable of standing on their own two feet.
Indeed, simply by putting his African-Americans on their feet instead of on their backs, bellies or knees.
He afforded them an unusually high degree of respect.
With its multiple rows, military figures lined up for abreast, each row dissolving from high to low relief into the bronze background,
the Shaw Memorial provides a plethora of individual faces gathered across the flat,
two dimensional surface of the picture plane and the narrowly raking three dimensional sculptural space.
Separate and unique, but also join closely together, these faces constitute a single collective face,
a united front wedged between an adverse past and a future that is perilous, but also potentially propitious.
Unlike the fatalistic black man alone and adrift in shark infested waters in Winslow Homer's 1899 allegory of racial futility,
the Gulf Stream, the black men here face their destiny with firm resolve and collective action.
The monument was unveiled on Memorial Day, 1897.
Exactly 34 years after the event that commemorates commemorates, which is not the attack on for Wagner,
but rather the departure of the regiment from Boston six weeks earlier.
The sculptor chose that is to emphasise a moment of hope and promise rather than defeat.
Nonetheless, sadness pervades the work.
All who attended the unveiling would have known that this march to war resulted in the death of the hero and the decimation of his regiment.
That regiment long disbanded the veterans of the fifty fourth reconvened for the unveiling.
These were the survivors, first of the bloody assault, the claim their comrades and their leader,
but also of the hardships of being poor and black in post reconstruction America.
They were survivors, too, of old age.
The relief depicts them as mostly young, marching south with their leader on Beacon Street away from the Massachusetts statehouse,
as they had done on a bright May morning in 1863. Now, on a misty grey morning in May, a third of a century later, none of them young anymore.
The veterans paraded uphill along the same street. St. Gaudens, shown here at approximately this time, was moved by their presence at the ceremony.
Years later, he recalled watching them confront the monument, quote,
The impression of those old soldiers passing the very spot where they had left for war so many years before thrills me.
Even as I write these words, they seemed as if returning from the war, the troops of bronze marching in the opposite direction,
the direction in which they had left for the front, and the young men there represented now showing these veterans the vigour and hope of youth.
Over the years, the Shaw Memorial elicited strong responses from artists and intellectuals who were captivated by its visual and moral power.
The speakers at the dedication ceremony were two famed moral leaders, Booker T. Washington,
the most honoured spokesperson for black America and the Hot Lips hopes that slide was supposed to come earlier.
But here we go. The speaker the dedication ceremony were to famed moral leaders, Booker T. Washington,
the most honoured spokesperson for black America, and the Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James.
James vehemently opposed the jingoism and sabre rattling that would eventually lead the nation into a brief war with Spain,
followed by a prolonged conflict with native insurgents in the U.S. occupied Philippines.
He took the occasion of the dedication ceremony to remind his audience that Colonel Shaw and his men had fought and
died for a great principle the abolishment of slavery and not for personal gain or glory or nationalist pride.
In the years to come, the Shaw memorial served as a muse to a range of American writers and artists.
Charles Ives set it to music in 1911, is the singer.
The title was The St. Gaudens in Boston Common, which he later included in his three places in the New England.
Ralph Ellison was guided by it as an artistic model when he began writing his novel about racial injustice.
The Invisible Man, which was published in 1952 and in 1960,
Robert Lowell wrote his searing poem about it for the Union Dead, from which I quoted earlier.
Eventually, however, the memorial fell into a sad state of disrepair.
In 1973,
it's blighted condition inspired collaboration between the essayist and ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein and the photographer Richard Benson.
Kirstine wrote eloquently of the ongoing relevance of the monument in the post civil rights era,
and Benson's photographs turned it stained and streaked surfaces into hauntingly beautiful images of decay.
Once the monument was returned to pristine condition in the early 1980s and the
previously apps and names of the fallen foot soldiers were inscribed in its base.
The memorial attracted newfound attention. Here we see a visit to it in the early 2000s by members of the famed Boys Choir of Harlem.
Shortly after the monument was restored, a film producer caught sight of it one day as he was crossing Boston Common.
He commissioned a script to be written and eventually the movie Glory, inspired by the monument, came out to much acclaim and popular success in 1989.
It's easy to be critical of the film as an exercise in white liberal paternalism since it required the presence of a white movie star.
Matthew Broderick in order to receive financing. Here I show you.
Broderick on the right, made up to look like Shaw as seen in the period photograph.
Problematically,
the narrative of the film implies that black Americans could not attaining their goals without the intervention of noble minded whites,
that they were not agents of their own destiny.
That said, the filmmakers goal was to make the foot soldiers, not Shaw, the collective hero of the tale.
As film historian Bruce Chadwick has noted, Shaw was, quote, the character with the most lines, but was not the focus of the story.
Clearly, the actors, costume designers and makeup artist scrupulously studied St. Gaudens vision of Shaw and
the enlisted men of the Fifty Fourth when creating the lead characters in the drama.
I was tempted to show you some clips from the film, but. To something else.
So here we see Morgan Freeman in one leading role. And Denzel Washington in another for which he won his first Academy Award.
You succeeded in its goal of rescuing the anonymous black soldiers of the fifty fourth Massachusetts from oblivion.
They were not anonymous, of course. We have and have always had historical documentation, names,
ranks and home addresses of those who served in the regiment, but like foot soldiers in any army at any time.
The men were little more to us than names, ranks and addresses.
Here is where creative art, unlike social or military history, provides a distinct service.
It fabricates characters. It invents them or Kabulis them together from bits and pieces of real life people or from other fictional characters.
In so doing, it allows us to imagine the inner life of individuals who actually did exist but left little or no firsthand record of their experiences.
The soldiers in bronze, like those in the movie, are emotionally compelling compositors fictionalisation that nonetheless strike us as real.
Glory is the only instance I can think of in which a major Hollywood film was based on a work of sculpture.
To be sure, it was based as well on historic on historical characters and events, including Shaw's letters to his family.
Nonetheless, the closing credits of the film roll over a tight frame on the freeze of the Shaw Memorial in prominent,
if tacit, acknowledgement of sync on it. So here we will try to run the.
The Boys Choir of Harlem singing. I think you've seen Gaudens is one of the most important 19th century progenitors of American cinema.
His work anticipates Hollywood aesthetics. He was a master of the close up before that term was invented.
He can also be thought of as having pioneered the low angle establishing shot so familiar
from the classic Westerns of John Ford and others as here in this monument to the Civil War.
General John Logan as a lone rider on a hill.
A figure similar to Saint Gaudens in that regard is the late 19th and early 20th century book illustrator Howard Pyle,
the subject of my Teryl lecture in this auditorium a week from today, as I hope to have shown,
St. Gaudens was remarkably a remarkably sensitive and acute portraitist in bronze.
He was an extraordinary technician with an ability to compose on both an epic and an intimate scale.
He memorialised the rich and famous. But also, as with the ancillary figures of the Shaw memorial, the underprivileged, an unknown.
He was a giant of Gilded Age America, one of the most enduring artists of the American renaissance through the nuance
and stylistic versatility of his sculptural move over a series of decades.
He shaped the way the generations of Americans and visitors to America encountered its history.
He pictured the nation in ways that we are still wrestling with today.
Then again, perhaps Americans are not sufficiently sufficiently wrestling with these matters.
We can argue about the ultimate ideological meaning of the Shaw Memorial in terms of its racial politics.
Is it a work of paternalistic white liberalism in which a privileged Caucasian rides literally,
above and figuratively on the shoulders and backs of African-Americans or to the contrary?
Does it constitute an eloquent and powerful call for racial dignity and respect at a moment in U.S. history,
when Jim Crow racism characterised by systemic violence against African-Americans seems once again to be on the rise?
However, we might wish to answer the question of the sculpture's racial implications.
It seems indisputable to me that the Shaw Memorial, more than any other public monument in America as citizens to take race seriously.